Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

  • Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran

    Mokhtarian, Jason Sion. 2015. Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran. Berkeley. University of California Press.

    Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud’s dozens of texts that portray three Persian “others”: the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the jews

    TOC:

    -List of Abbreviations
    -Note on Translations, Transcriptions, and Manuscripts
    -Acknowledgments
    -Introduction
    -1. The Sources and Methods of Talmudic and Iranian Studies
    -2. Comparing Sasanian Religions
    -3. Rabbinic Portrayals of Persians as Others
    -4. Rabbis and Sasanian Kings in Dialogue
    -5. Rabbis and Zoroastrian Priests in Judicial Settings
    -6. Rabbis, Sorcerers, and Priests
    -Conclusion: Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests in Sasanian Iran
    -Notes
    -Bibliography
    -Index

     

    Jason Sion Mokhtarian is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

  • Samarkand and Soghd During the Abbasid Period: Political and Social History

    Karev, Yuri. 2015. Samarqand et le Sughd à l’époque ‘abbasside: Histoire politique et sociale. (Cahiers de Studia Iranica 55). Paris. Peeters.

    During the Abbasid period (750-820), the vast territories beyond the Amu Darya river (the Mawara’annahr), conquered by the Umayyad generals in the first half of the eighth century, entered definitively into the cultural sphere of Islam. The comparative analysis of medieval Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, supplemented by materials from unpublished manuscripts, as well as the latest results yielded by archaeological excavations at Samarkand, have made it possible to establish a fine-grained chronology of this turning point in the history of Central Asia. Examined in this new light are complex and irreversible processes that resulted in a changed political and religious fabric, transformations of the Sogdian and Muslim elite, and the evolution of the state’s system of controlling territories on its borders, within a context of confrontations and diplomatic relations between the caliphate, the Tang empire in China, and the Turks.

    For more information, see the Table of Contents of this volume.

  • Conference: The Past in the Present of the Middle East

    The Past in the Present of the Middle East

    Starts: 15 April 2016, 9:00 AM
    Finishes: 16 April 2016, 5:00 PM
    Venue: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre

    Call for papers and posters for a two-day conference organised by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the London Middle East Institute to showcase the work of CBRL and its partners in the region. The conference will present sessions on a number of themes linking the past to the present day in the Middle East.

    • Cultural heritage in conflict
    • Cultural heritage, society and economics
    • Britain and the Levant: Culture and (Mis)Communication
    • The past in the political present: the legacy of colonialism and intervention
    • The Politics of Dissent: challenges to Orientalism and Zionism
    • The impact of research – working with humanitarian agencies/practitioners

    Closing session: The future of the past in the Middle East

    (more…)

  • On Judeo-Persian 1

    McCollum, Adam. 2015. On Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part One: State of the field. Ancient Jew Review.

    In a two-part series, Dr. Adam McCollum addresses the possibilities for the field of Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part One addresses the state of the field and Part Two includes a helpful bibliography and four text samples.

    You can find out more about Adam McCollum and his work over at his blog, hmmlorientalia, or at his highly recommended Twitter account: @adamcmccollum.

  • Iranian Studies (vol. 48, issue 5)

    Iranian Studies (vol. 48, issue 5)

    Special Issue of Iranian Studies 48(5), edited by Stephanie Cronin and Edmund Herzig: Russian Orientalism to Soviet Iranology: The Persian-speaking world and its history through Russian eyes.

    This collection comprises a collective study of the genesis and development of Iranian Studies, or Iranology, in imperial Russia and subsequently in the Soviet Union. It takes as its specific point of departure the controversies regarding whether Russian, or post-1917 Soviet, scholars and administrators and the discourses they produced on the Persophone world were Orientalist in the sense made famous by Edward Said.

    Guest Editors’ Preface

  • A Short Chronicle on the End of the Sasanian Empire and Early Islam

    ssssal-Ka’bi, Nasir. 2015. A Short Chronicle on the End of the Sasanian Empire and Early Islam. New Jersey: Gorgias Press.

    The Short Chronicle is probably part of a Church History that is no longer extant, and it was written by an Ecclesiastic living in the north of Mesopotamia and belonging to the Church of the East. It is an eyewitness report on a crucial historical period, the mid-7th century that witnessed the demise of two contending world empires, the Sasanian and the Byzantine, and their replacement by Islam, thus signaling the end of Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. The Chronicle may be the earliest Syriac document which relies heavily on official Sasanian sources, including Khwaday-namag, when it discusses secular history, and on church histories when dealing with ecclesiastical matters. It may also be the oldest Syriac chronicle which deals with the advent of Mu?ammad and the ensuing Arab conquest, and which mentions Arab cities for the first time ever, including Mosul, Kufa, and Basra.

  • Daēuuas vertreibende Worte

    Cantera, Alberto. 2015. Daēuuas vertreibende Worte: Die Läuterungsrituale in V9–12. In Philippe Swennen (ed.), Démons iraniens: actes du colloque international organisé à la Université de Liège les 5 et 6 février 2009 à l’occasion des 65 ans de Jean Kellens, 77–96. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège.

    Many Avestan texts are considered to have a great protective capacity against the daēuuas, especially the names of the Amәѕa Spәta, their Yašts and the Staota Yesniia (above all the Ahuna Vairiia). They are combined in different forms to provide bāǰ „prayers that accompany the ritual action“ and keep the daēuuas away from the ritual. Most ritual actions are accompanied by three bāǰ: one opening, one closing and one accompanying bāǰ. The use of such bāǰ is especially frequent in the purification rituals. V10 and 11 are examined under this perspective and it is concluded that V10 presents probably the alternative accompa­nying bāǰ for a baršnum-ceremony and V11 for a purification ritual for different elements.

  • From Babylonian to Old Persian Cuneiform

    Bergerhausen, Johannes. 2014. Digitale Keilschrift | Digital cuneiform. Mainz: Schmidt.
    For three millennia, cuneiform was the dominant writing system in the ancient eastern world. More than half a million cuneiform tablets are still in existence. They are stored in museums and collections, some of them have never been translated.  Ever since the rediscovery of these ancient cultures in the 19th century, the pictographic characters of the world’s oldest script have fascinated researchers and fans alike. Today, the shapes seem surprisingly modern and thrill not just archaeologists and scholars, but typographers, textile designers and tattooists, too.This book presents a typographical journey through time in book form – a key to the ancient cultures or the earliest form of type hype with 544 pages with all known cuneiform characters from Mesopotamian to Babylonian to Ancient Persian, with numerals and punctuation, type tables and background information as well as access to the digital cuneiform font.

  • Review of Éric Pirart’s ‘Le sort de Gâthâs’

    Ferrer, Juan. 2014. Review of Éric Pirart (ed.). 2013. Le sort de Gâthâs et autres études iraniennes in memoriam Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin (Acta Iranica 54). Leuven-Paris-Walpole, MA: Peeters Publishers. Aula Orientalis 32. 388–391.

  • Vandidād-e Jahānbaxši

    ms. 4161
    Fol. 2r, Vidēvdād manuscript ms. 4161 (Vandidad-e Jahānbaxši), Tehran University © Avestan Digital Archive

    Cantera, A., & Mazdapour, K. (Eds). (2015). The Liturgical Widēwdād manuscript ms. 4161 (Vandidad-e Jahānbaxši). Salamanca; Tehran: Sociedad de Estudios Iranios y Turanios.

    The ms. 4161 belonged to the Jahānbaxši family and was purchased by the Avestan Digital Archive in 2012. Since then it is hosted in the Central Library of the Tehran University as a long-term loan. It contains the longest version of the Yasna ceremony, which consists of the Yasna with the Wisperad and Widēwdād intercalations together with instructions in Middle Persian for the right performance of the ritual. An exclusive feature of this manuscript is that it includes on the margin and written by a second hand the description of the contents of the Widēwdād that appear in the eighth book of the Dēnkard.
    We have chosen this manuscript for the first volume of the series because of its importance for the Avestan textual criticism. Most of the known Avestan manuscripts produced in Iran were written by members of the learned family of Marzbān Frēdōn or were copied from manuscripts produced within this family. Ms. 4161 does not belong to this group, although it was written only some years after the oldest preserved manuscripts of the Marzbān family. It is closer to a very famous manuscript hosted in the Cama Oriental Institute, the ms. 4020 (Mf2), and other manuscripts discovered recently. But, whereas Mf2 is an Indian copy of an Iranian original sent to India, ms. 4161 is the only manuscript of this group that was still produced in Iran and is therefore not affected by the influence of the Indian environment.
    The book contains one English preface written in English by Katayoun Mazdapour and two introductions: one in Persian, by Katayoun Mazdāpour and one in English by Alberto Cantera. In these introductions, it is dealt with different aspects of the history of the manuscript and its position among other Avestan manuscripts of the same class. The main section of the book is the high-quality colour facsimile of the 268 folios of the manuscript with indexing in the margins.